Columbia's Landing
KERBYSMITH
Winkle about it all. After 541/2 hours in
earth orbit an airplane-not a capsule
or a command module but an air
plane, a ship with wings-descends above
the high desert of California. It glides
toward a landing at Edwards Air Force
Base. As in the old days, the mirages of Rog
ers Dry Lake envelop it like a hallucination.
The ship makes a perfect touchdown and
rolls to a stop. At last the commander
emerges. He is 50 years old. He has grown
old and farsighted waiting for this flight. He
had to wear glasses to read the instrument
panel. He opens his mouth and out comes a
drawl that takes me back 25 years, at least,
to the cowboy days of Chuck Yeager.
Not to press John Young into the role of
Rip Van Winkle, but his flight with his 43
year-old copilot, Robert Crippen, in the
space shuttle Columbiaresumes a story that
was broken off a quarter of a century ago. It
returns the American space program to
where it started-which was not Cape
Canaveral but the throwback landscape
of Edwards Air Force Base, a terrain that
evolution left behind, a desert decorated
with the arthritic limbs of Joshua trees and
memories of Chuck Yeager, Scott Cross
field, Joe Walker, Iven Kincheloe, and other
pioneers of manned rocket flight.
Yeager began the American advance
toward space at Edwards-or Muroc as it
was then called-on October 14, 1947,
when he broke the sound barrier in the X-1.
The X-1 was the first in a series of experi
mental aircraft built solely to test the effects
of supersonic speeds and very high altitudes
on aerodynamics and structural integrity.
The X-1 consisted of a four-chamber rocket
with wings (just six inches thick), tail assem
bly, cockpit, and a set of controls. There
were scarcely 30 people on hand who knew
what it meant when Yeager's sonic boom hit
the desert floor. The Air Force had a security
lid on the X-1 project, and no announce
ment was made of Yeager's triumph. The
only celebration was a free steak dinner and
474